AIM: Helping You Lose Weight

Obesity is the number one health condition that exists in America, with at least half the population being overweight to morbidly obese. That's not surprising considering the significant increase in portion size over the past decade, followed by an increase in processed fats, oils, and food by-products injected in many food items to appeal to society's appetites. Sure, one can eat a variety of "healthy" foods, such as vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains, followed by an intense workout schedule, to lose a few pounds but with that bucket of delicious french vanilla sitting in his freezer, and a marathon of Game of Thrones broadcasting at this moment. he will definitely gain weight lost those weeks of weight loss in a matter of days. Sure, there are many helpful and useful tools to help one get ripped, but often require the user to manually input the information of the nutrition of foods or the amount of time spent doing one specific exercise which can be often hard to find, especially if one is eating at those fancy Italian restaurant, with that heavy cream sauteed in a neat risotto. AIM, Automatic Ingestion Monitor, is a new device among the many that aims to reduce the tediousness of this cumbersome process. Developed in the University of Alabama, AIM is a 3D printed heatset which contains a complex sensor that can detect whether a person is chewing food or doing other stuff with his mouth, and, once the chewing is detected, the camera inside the headset takes a photo of the dish the user is currently eating. The data, number of chews and the photos, are sent to an application and identifies the food(s) and estimates how much of the food(s) is eaten given by the number of chews and the photos. The application then determines the energy content of the food item and records it for the user. AIM is more likely, however, to be marketed as a medical device, but future developments could make it available for the consumer market. To see more about AIM, follow this link: http://www.gizmag.com/automatic-ingestion-monitor-diet-tracking/34606/ 

SkySense Pad: Making Charging Easier

In recent years, the popularity of drone technology has significantly increased. At first, drones initially where used for military applications, such as unmanned aerial assaults and surveillance. Now drones have not only made accessible to the public, but are used in many other useful applications such as personal aerial delivery, photography, and even advanced film making. Despite the many useful applications drones can fulfill, they do have their limitations; for example, drones must refuel or recharge at specific times, depending on how much fuel is left, and charging stations could be very far from the current position of the drone which could result in the thousand dollar drone crashing, or landing safely in a location too far for the user to reach. Furthermore, charging requires the drone to be hooked up to a charging supply via charging adapters which can be cumbersome and time consuming. To solve this problem, SkySense has developed a charging pad capable of charging drones from the moment they land. The pad is gold plated with a power input of 100-240 V, and a charge rate of 10 A. The company states that the pad is compatible with any drone, from quadcopters to VTOLs. The pad is built for indoor and outdoor use, capable of withstanding rust from rain, allowing users to charge their drones outside from being used for agricultural and surveillance use. Three models are available, a small 17 inch, medium 34 inch, and a large 68 inch, each costing $649, $1,425, and $4,365 respectively, and will be available for purchase in January of next year. To see more about the SkySense pad, follow this link: http://www.gizmag.com/skysense-pad-charging-drone-lands/34592/

Multicore Optic Fibres: Redefining Speed

Speed is what drives society forwards. Literally. From the beginning of time, speed was an essential in living; an organism cannot escape or catch prey if it is too slow. But speed can be in many different forms; though speed might exist in the naive mind of a typical person as the velocity of a powerful sports car, speed also exists in electrical components, from biological muscle impulses responsible for the hundreds to millions of muscle contractions needed for organs of an organism to function properly, or else it dies, to the billions of binary signals executed in the vast array of semiconductors, transistors, resistors, and microprocessors in a computer's motherboard. Clearly, the faster something is, the better, especially for telecommunications. As data capacity in many electronic devices increase exponentially, the need for speed increases as well; society demands large files, in gigabytes, not megabytes, to be received and sent in minutes, not days. Currently, the fastest method of transmitting data is through fibre optic cables, capable of sending data at 100 terabits per second; however, as a few years go by, the demand for bigger bandwidth speeds will surpass this limit. For researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Central Florida, they have developed a future solution; a multicore optic cable able to send 5000 DVD's worth of data, from one source to another, in one second. By adding seven cores to the fibre optic cable, noise is significantly reduced from increasing the signal strength, and bandwidth speeds can reach speeds of up to 255 terabits per second over a 1 km cable. The individual fibres in in the optic cable are about 0.2mm in diameter, so they are relatively thin. The researchers hope that, by the end of the decade, they will develop an optic cable capable of reaching petabit per second speeds, meeting, and even exceeding, future demand. To see more about optic fibre, see the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/data-transmission-speed-record/34553/

New Power Inverter: More Power, Better Efficiency

Electricity has been one of mankind's greatest discoveries, allowing humanity to advance in technology exponentially faster than before. Not only is it very significant in terms of history, but also vital in current society infrastructures; nearly every career, industry, and household contain some sort of electricity executed and properly converted into a desired output from an advanced, or relatively simple, electric system. Furthermore, education has become more involved in electricity; electrical, computer, and software engineering fields have grown to the point where they are probably the largest university fields in the planet. Though there are many electrical features in a car, but one feature that, if frequent in every vehicle procured from automotive manufacturers, can reduce carbon footprints is, obviously,  electrical power system which, in other words, means a car propelled though a battery rather than easily depleted, nonrenewable hydrocarbons. Some vehicle manufacturers, such as Mitsubishi, Ford, and Tesla, all feature vehicles that run on electricity, but what if there was an electrical "combustion" system, or a component of that system, that could be improved so that, one day, all vehicles will be powered by electricity. There is a possible solution to that, and it is a new power inverter developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The power inverter is capable of producing 20 kW of power at a volume of only 91 cubic inches, four times more powerful than the inverter featured in Google's electric cars. The semiconductor used is silicon carbide,  a high grade material used for high power applications and can tolerate a wide range of temperatures. The device is composed, 50%, from 3d printed parts, allowing researchers to develop a high performance heat sink system. The inverter, however, is only a prototype at the moment, but researchers hope that, with a few more changes, it could be four times more powerful than itself. To see more about the inverter, click the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/ornl-high-performance-power-inverter/34453/

Blunt + Tile Umbrella: Innovation or a Gimmick?

Throughout today's advances of technology, many great men have created impressive new technologies from new found discoveries to make living life easier. Others, however, rip off these ideas, and try to incorporate these new technologies into items of impractical daily use, all to make a quick buck in a society of wealth. Current technology, such as smart watches and Wi-fi cameras, try to accomplish something new to improve or extend the way society uses technology, but fails to do so. One especially is Blunt and Tile's smart umbrella. The umbrella is basically a uniquely designed umbrella, the typical spokes replaced with blunts to reduce wear and tear and prevent eyeballs being ripped out from the eyesockets of incoming strangers, with a bluetooth tracker attached to it. The bluetooth module works with a smartphone application so that, in the case one ever loses his umbrella, they can track it. There are two ways that the module helps the clumsy owner find their umbrella; if within a 15 to 30m radius of the location of the umbrella, the umbrella will emit a tune, or else the application will points its location out on a map. The two models equipped with Tile's module, Blunt's Metro XS and Classic, each cost $69 and $99 respectively with the app only available to apple users at this time. Clearly, this technology is quite impractical as who would ever buy a one hundred dollar umbrella if he lives in cold climates or places that rarely rain, or those who actually have time to get their lost umbrella. To see more about this overpriced gimmick, go to this link: http://www.gizmag.com/blunt-tile-bluetooth-trackable-smart-umbrella/34328/

SightCompass: Helping the Blind

For many years, blindness is one of the many disabilities that gravely affects one's lifestyle. The visual sense of human beings is one that is most vital: sight is the most significant sense when one needs to navigate foreign areas, or recognizing objects and being visually stimulated by many new visual technologies. Furthermore, being blind prevents one from reacting appropriately to many immanent dangers, from rock slides to crossing the street. There are ways to help the blind, such as sight dogs that give indication to objects that the blind cannot hear, and prototype technologies that give the blind a glimpse of vision, or help the blind "see". One specifically is SightCompass, made by WorldBeacon,  a system that combines proximity beacons and a smartphone application to help the blind "see". The system consists of an array of beacons fixed to any object or building and can be programmed to output specific information such object such as the layout of the building and where everything is in that building. The beacons are detected via bluetooth with a 92m detection radius, and they have a battery life of 2 years, so these beacons can help the blind for a long time. The system itself has not been implemented yet, but arrangements has been made with many organizations that help the blind to install these systems in various sites in Arizona. It's currently in development, and even resorted to crowdfunding to raise awareness of their system in hopes that SightCompass will be evident in many educational and business institutions. To see more about the SightCompass, follow this link:http://www.gizmag.com/sightcompass-bluetooth-beacons-blind-surroundings/34282/

NavVis: Revolutionizing Map Making

For centuries, maps have been made to mark multiple of newly discovered landforms and cities so that others from foreign origins may visit those places to satisfy their crave for adventure. But in those days, maps were made by hand and required exceptional visual memory, and even those maps are not as good as maps right now; they were only two dimensional and were updated every other year or more. With new ultrasonic and mapping technologies, maps now feature three dimensions, and also reveal significantly accurate images of landforms in a two dimensional plane, as well as added visual details such as local buildings, all of which are updated on a much faster pace than centuries ago. The most notable example of this is Google Maps, which controls the majority of this market, but there is a new device that might compete against the many technologies that created Google Maps. Its called NavVis, developed by researchers that the Technical University of Munich, and consists of two laser scanners and two cameras. The devices works with a human operator that moves the device around the desired area where the scanners record the horizontal and lateral positions of the hallway while the cameras take pictures of nearly every detail in the area, much more efficient than Google's method of creating 3D maps which usually involves one camera. Once every detail is recorded, a 3D map is created featuring all the pictures in the appropriate positions. Accompanied with navigation software, users are able to virtually take a tour around the area, seeing every surface in the area with astonishing detail. Furthermore, NavVis's IndoorViewer interface allows the owner to add additional and informative content at various parts of the map, and allows the owner to also augment any data of their generated map to their specifications. To see more about the NavVis, click the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/navvis-interactive-mapping-trolley/34316/